Rebecca
by HesMines
Summary: "Living in another woman's shadow wasn't fun, it wasn't glamorous and it certainly didn't look like her Maxim would be sweeping her off her feet any time soon." Martha is seeing parallels between her life and the novel. Ten/Rose


**For those of you reading my NCIS or Harry Potter stuff, I've been ill and the idea of constructing full coherent sentences is rather daunting at the moment. Which is also why there are no reviews/replies. This is just something I found lying around on my laptop that wasn't quite finished. (My first Doctor Who fic that I'm actually half happy with/haven't dingyed half way though cos I thought it was silly.) However, since I haven't looked at it for about a year, I can't actually remember how it was going to end! Last year I did my Personal Study on **Rebecca** and even though my essay eventually was on the link between Mrs. Danvers and Rebecca I looked at the whole thing in **_**painstaking**_** detail. All I can remember is sitting doing the essay one night, DW was on and I can remember seeing Martha's face at one point and going 'there's actually a lot of similarities'! Then my Ten/Rose shipper fought back and I got this :D Well I've added two paragraphs to finish it where it was, tweaked it a little but essentially it hasn't changed.**

**Disclaimer - I don't own Doctor Who, Rebecca or anything else you might recognise :)**

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><p>Sometimes, Martha Jones felt like she was living in a gothic novel.<p>

Realistically, she knew she was being melodramatic. That the whole feeling was probably down to the _slight_ obsession her English teacher had had for the genre and the fact they'd just returned from a planet dedicated to the Addam's Family. Well, in her mind anyway. There were too many similarities between their culture and the films for it to be a coincidence, no matter what the Doctor said.

That was how she'd found herself locked in her room, rereading Rebecca. The Doctor was sitting in the library, reading some thick leather-bound book in a language that looked more like art than words. Although, she supposed, Chinese was exactly the same when compared with English. But she knew he wasn't reading Chinese. Sighing, she got off her bed and walked over to where her book had landed when she'd thrown it away in anger. It wasn't the book's fault that she could suddenly see parallels with her own life.

Martha sighed heavily as she picked up the book then sat with her back against the wall. No, it wasn't the book's fault. It was hers. She could go home at any time, she could stop seeing the similarities, but she couldn't bring herself to leave. She fingered the battered spine of the book, a sign of how much she'd loved the story. Excluding Harry Potter, this was the only book she had two copies of. One was covered in various colours of highlighter, with notes scribbled in the margins and pages folded down to show important quotes. This one was a lot more battered, with Martha losing counts of how many times she had read it. However, when you get to the point where you could quote entire sections of text word for word, you have a problem.

The story was so familiar. A young woman, bored in her own life, falls in love with a much older, mysterious stranger who whisks her away from the monotony of her life…and then she meets his wife. Okay, that was overstating it. A lot. Then she encounters the _memory_ of his wife. The perfect, loved, _missed_, ever-present Ros- _Rebecca_. The narrator is already in too deep when she discovers the hold Rebecca still has on the world.

Her home is still run like Rebecca ran it. People still remember Rebecca and her tragic, untimely death. Still love her. _You_ _see_, _you_ _are_ _so_ _very_ _different_ _from_ _Rebecca_. Every time she feels like she's getting somewhere, like she's making some progress, Rebecca reappears. She's uncomfortable in her own skin. She can't fit into this new world. And she's damn sure that if Rose would just _back_ _off_ she'd do a hell of a lot better.

Rebecca. _Rebecca_. The narrator needs Rebecca to back off.

_Gothic fiction is characterised by picturesque settings, an atmosphere of mystery and terror, and a hint of violence and the supernatural. __**Rebecca**__ has all of this; the mansion consumed by fire, the romance between an older man and a younger woman, the lurking, secret-enshrouded presence of a first wife…_

Mr. Clarkson's voice echoes down the years and Martha suddenly feels like she's back in the classroom, sitting next to her best friend and swearing she'd never be the narrator. Because, really, who wants to be some nameless entity. Even if you do overcome the demons in the end, even if he loves you, you're still no one. It's Rebecca who lives on forever.

Martha always thought she'd be Rebecca. It was naïve, but she was sixteen and the world was her oyster. Now, after meeting the Doctor, she had a newfound empathy for the narrator. Living in another woman's shadow wasn't fun, it wasn't glamorous and it certainly didn't look like her Maxim would be sweeping her off her feet any time soon.

_Rose'd know what to do._

Her life really was a gothic novel. All of the elements were there.

Use of the supernatural was key while you needed a dark, mysterious house that seemed to take on a personality of its own. She was sitting in her bedroom on a bigger on the inside blue box that was currently floating in the middle of time and space. _Supernatural_ didn't even begin to cover it. And, no matter how much the Doctor tried to deny it, the TARDIS hated her. Legitimately hated her. His messing about with the controls could only explain being plunged into darkness, water in the shower going cold, missing socks and burnt toast so many times. Sometimes she felt like the ship was glaring at her, which was impossible because, at the end of the day, it was only a spaceship.

She'd met the "witch-like character" on her very first trip. She had been offered advice by countless individuals, all telling her the same thing. Don't get too attached. He leaves you all in the end. This isn't the man I knew, he was happier before.

_Doctor…what happened to Rose?_

_Doctor…where is she?_

_Doctor…_

A hero-villain haunted by the past. That described the Doctor down to a tee. A good man who had done bad things. A man who had destroyed entire worlds for the good of everyone else. His past haunted him, but Martha was never sure if it was nightmares of the destruction of _Gallifrey or losing Rose at Canary Wharf that made him scream in the night. _

_Falling in love never occurred to me. Already done it once. Don't want or need to do it again._

Martha sighed again as she made to stand up from her position on the floor. She knew it was bad for her, staying when she knew she couldn't have what she wanted, but she couldn't make herself leave. Because, no matter what she'd said when she was younger, if he loved her it'd be enough. The heroine came into her own when she overcame Rebecca's memory. She was no one, namless, but she was happy.

So she'd hold on, hoping that one day he'd turn around and tell her what _really_ happened. That all these memories of Rose that people carried in their hearts were just illusions. Illusions created by an act on her part and nostalgia on theirs. That in reality she was wicked, manipulative and that he'd never loved her.

But she knew that it would never happen, because that wasn't the way it worked. Because she wasn't the young, fair-haired woman forced apart from her true love. She wasn't the hero.

That's all Martha wanted, really. To be the heroine of her own story. This life was great, but she wasn't the main character. She was the secondary character, keeping the story going and the hero alive until the heroine made her grand reappearance. The writers might give her a happy ending, they might make her suffering worth it, or they'd write her out. Leave her story unfinished. Because, really, who cares what happens to the minor characters? Their existence is fleeting, the heroes live on forever.

Rose Tyler would return. Martha could see the signs, even if the Doctor couldn't. That was the positive side about living on Earth your entire life, not just visiting time periods every so often. You got the full picture. The Doctor said he had never met the Queen Mother, but Martha would recognize that outfit anywhere.

_Time isn't linear, Martha. It might have happened by your perspective of time, but I have never met the Queen Mother. And, you know, that title is actually a relative term. I could tell you I've met the Queen, and I have, but which one? That is the question! Did I ever tell you about the time Rose and I got banished by Queen Victoria?_

He'd gone off on one of his rants, and she'd zoned out. Nodding and smiling at the right moments, and trying not to let her hurt show on her face. Maybe she wasn't Rose, but he didn't need to rub it in. So she'd let him ramble, never quite finding the moment to tell him that he'd had a blonde girl wrapped around him in the picture. She justified it later by telling herself that he didn't give her a moment to get a word in edgeways. But she couldn't quite get rid of the voice saying that she didn't tell him because she couldn't stand seeing his face light up when she told him Rose was coming home.

Martha flopped back down onto her bed with a muffled thump, opening her book where she'd left off. Rose was coming back. It was a fact. Martha just hoped she wasn't there when it happened.

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><p><strong>Hmmm…turning my English notes into fanfics seemed to be something I was doing a lot last year. Maybe that's why I got an A!<strong>

**Okay, so most of my quotes are either from the show, Rebecca or things that happened previously in my head. However, one of them (done it once) is not me. I can't remember the exact wording (I have a feeling it was longer) or where its from, but I know it was in a fic by **Laura x Tennant**so yeah all the credit goes to her for that line and I'd seriously recommend anything by her :) **


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